[ soft music ]
JUSTICE: Welcome to your audio companion formed in support of access and in the spirit of community. I’m Justice Shorter and you’re listening to the Disaster Justice Guidebook for People of Color with Disabilities. Each companion is comprised of remarkable reflections and recommendations gathered from interviews, with incredible People of Color. This creative collaboration is brought to you by Seeded Ground, the Adult Advocacy Centers in 1217 compound. May this offering be a salve and a sought- out source of solidarity for all those most impacted by disasters in crisis.
This particular companion is guided by insights from Malkia Devich Cyril. Malkia is a writer, public speaker and award-winning activist on issues of digital rights, narrative power, Black liberation and collective grief. Malkia is the founding and former executive director of Media Justice. Justice, rights and dignity in a digital agent after more than 20 years of media Justice leadership, Malkia is founding and former executive director of Media Justice. A national hub boldly advancing racial justice rights and dignity in a digital age. After more than 20 years of Media Justice leadership, Malkia is now the founder and residence at Media Justice, a leading edge fellow and a strategist and residence at the narrative initiative.
Exploring public narratives and movement building strategies on grief and race. Malkia is truly one of the most prolific voices I’ve ever heard speaking about grief. I immediately perk up ready to collect a bag full of precious gems and jewels every time I encounter their work. Here is Malkia leading this conversation off with the relevance and the reach of loss and grief throughout crisis.
MALKIA: I think it’s important to first note that in the context of disaster, massive disaster, we’re talking about mass death events, you know. And whether the disaster is the pandemic, or it’s an earthquake or some other kind of weather-related disaster, anything that takes multiple lives, you know, mass shooting, you know, or destroy other, creates other kinds of secondary losses, loss of home, loss of land, loss of connection, you know, loss of infrastructure, all of these various losses, including loss of life, not only displace people physically, but also emotionally, right. Create mass grief events.
Grief is not something that is generally recognized as a, as something that requires an intervention after a disaster. For example, in the aftermath of, wouldn’t even call it the aftermath, in this period that we’re in now, following our most acute experience of the pandemic, you know, grief services have not been part of the intervention that the state has, you know, has offered. And I think that’s a significant failing. You know, a significant gap in both our understanding of how to respond to mass death events. But also the fact that it’s not just death that, such as lives that are loss, you know, there’s all kinds of, all kinds of losses. So, that’s the first thing, just recognizing that
[ soft music ]
JUSTICE: Despite what we’ve been traditionally told, disasters don’t impact us all the same. And that hard truth is heavy to hold, especially when your hands are already full trying to carry everything you need to survive. What Malkia encourages us to tend to our own personal sorrow while also learning to collectively make space for mass grief.
MALKIA: The second piece I think that’s important is recognizing that death is disproportionate, too, right. In the context of a disaster, all lives are not taken equally. People who are homeless or houseless, you know, those of us who have fewer resources on all kinds of levels, there’s, there’s a racial burden to death. There’s a racial disadvantage or disproportionality to mortality, right. There’s race. There’s class, you know, there’s other factors. And so, and especially when it comes to disability, you know, I am someone who uses a walker, you know.
I am someone who will not be able to quickly escape from a situation. I would need help. The truth is that many, many, many people who would not be considered disabled are also in that condition, are also in that situation, just elderly people, you know, babies, you know what I mean, like. There are lots of people who would need additional, additional help. So, those people are at greater risk of death. And so, I like to talk about the fact that death isn’t simply consequence of disadvantage, it’s also a cause of disadvantage. So, what I mean by that is this:
The disproportionate mortality that we face as a Black people, that we may face as queer people, that we may face as disabled people, as poor people, that also causes disproportionate grief, you know. And so, it creates, it creates, it creates a racial burden, if that makes sense, you know. It creates what is generally a painful collective experience or shared experience of, of death or loss, becomes also a source of disadvantage, becomes a source of suffering, right. Becomes a disproportionate, something that has disproportionate impact.
The writer Claudia Rankine wrote “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” you know, so that she’s acknowledging that for Black communities, death and grief have a disproportionate impact. They have disproportionate impact on our health, grief does. It has a disproportionate impact on our ability to learn in schools. It has a disproportionate impact on our ability to work. It has a disproportionate impact on our housing.
When I lost my wife, several years ago, and I was in a grief group, I would say more than 70% of the Black people in the room had lost their jobs as a result of grieving. Several of them had also; therefore, lost their housing. The consequences of unattended sorrow in Black communities are also political. Unattended sorrow can demobilize populations. It can demobilize progressive basis. It can decelerate action. The consequences for unattended grief are so vast, we don’t even fully understand them all. And the fact that we do know that, you know, between 2020 and 2023, we know more than 30,000 children in California alone lost a parent or a caregiver to COVID-19, you know.
We know that, you know, in 2020, in the most acute period of the pandemic, you know, nearly one in three Black people in America knew someone who died from COVID and that for every single death to COVID-19 or some related complications, we know at least nine additional people, you know, were affected. We know that a lot of survivors have been left behind, you know. This is how, this is a mass death event. This is how, this is how mass grief is born. The challenge is, and it’s not the only way, right.
And I could go on and on, right. I think I won’t try to say too much more about this, but, you know, when we talk about mass death, it’s not just, in fact the, it’s also like, for example, the experience of watching Black people die on television over and over and over again, those are mass death events because of the way we experience it, right. We know that in the first eight months of 2020, 164 Black lives were ended by law enforcement. You know, what I’m saying. At least 200 Black people was killed by police officers in 2021, you know, and the thing is that, you know, this may not sound like a lot of people in relation to the population, but when you think about the experience of watching that over and over again on television, this becomes a mass death event right.
We have experienced so much loss in the past period of time in the past 10 years, and not just death, these fires that we’re experiencing, the loss of certain types of belief of around certainty. Loss of natural environment. We can’t breathe, you know what I’m saying, like, you know. [ Laughter ] And then the political conditions and the economic conditions, the loss of certain — neoliberalism brought certain types of security, you know, even though, you know, it wasn’t, it is was deaf ( ) system for Black people, but there was stability connected to it. The emergent fascism that we’re experiencing now is a threat to that stability and it is going to create a new stability, right, an authoritarian stability. And that is a terrifying experience of loss as well.
So, so, in the context of any disaster, whether it’s a political disaster, or natural disaster, grief is ever present and requires, requires dedicated intervention.
[ soft music ]
JUSTICE: So, how exactly do we tend to sorrow? How do we give ourselves enough grace to grief? How can we focus on these needs and ways that eminate from within our own community? And what role should state actors play throughout this process?
MALKIA: So, number one, I think that the state, there are roles that the state should play that it has failed to play. The state should provide free grief counseling inside of multiple institutions, like the public education system. It should provide it within the context of public hospitals. It should provide it within the context of prisons and jails. It should provide it in the context of, I mean all of these places where folks who are indigent, folks who are poor, folks who are vulnerable in various ways, and particularly those people where People of Color are disproportionately represented, grief counseling is a must.
Now counseling is fine, that’s a very individualized response. I think that the true and the most important in intervention should be coming from the left, from the movement. And that, that means to me that it is our job to transform collective grief into collective action. I think that in fact, that is the approach to organizing that we need today, you know, community organizing and our understanding of it needs to change. As the kind of conditions that, you know, we talk about a time, place, condition and really understanding and making, making accurate assessments of our, of the relations of power, of our material conditions. And our material conditions right now are, are the conditions of mass death and mass grief. We see that. We are experiencing that. It’s very clear.
And so, our intervention, our approach, our response, as a movement to that, should be to better understand the nature of grief. To incorporate that understanding into our leadership development models, into our campaigns, into our narrative strategies. And then go about the business of transforming that, first of all, first transforming experience of mass grief, which is not necessarily collective. Just because you and I experience something at the same time, does not mean that we see ourselves as experiencing it together. That’s an organizing process, right? To collectivize our individual experiences. So, that is our first step. We have to help people to understand that they are going through this together. This is an experience of collective grief. That’s step one.
Step two is we have to then move that collective grief through a process that moves it to collective action. Grief is not sorrow. You know, sorrow is an emotion. Grief is an experience. And grief can take many forms. It can take the form of anger. It can take the form of joy. When I think about my wife, I am filled with joy, you know. I am filled with, I am thrilled at her existence.
And so, and so, I just, I want to differentiate between grief and sorrow because, unfortunately, I do believe that the left has been struck down by a certain level of melancholy, a certain degree of unattended sorrow. And I think unattended sorrow is toxic. It is painful. It demobilizes and decelerates, and that’s not what we need right now. We need to accelerate and we need to mobilize. So, we need a new understanding of grief that allows us to do that. So, collectivizing grief translating that collective grief into collective action through a series of activities, you know, through the way we do our leadership development through a healing, building a more healing centered model for organizing our people. This will help us organize across certain lines that right now divide our communities, you know.
Right now, we see that the right is really doing a lot to divide off men of color from everyone else, you know, Cisgendered men of color from everyone else, really to move them to the right, you know. Using patriarchy and using other kinds of gender divisions to target and oppress and attack trans communities in order to gain more authority over the structure of family over the structure of government.
And so, when we think about, right, this effort to divide us, this effort to isolate us, right, away from our other parts of our community, this is antithetical to the collectivizing of grief or of any experience. And so, our, if we can, if we can, if we can move with grief in our hand, you know, if we can move deliberately in using grief as fuel, I believe that we could actually use our shared experiences of grief to save the world, to save the planet, to save ourselves.
And so, those are some of the kinds of interventions, whether it’s a state intervention within institutions, playing the function that the state should play, or it’s a community- level intervention that the movement, you know, plays both in terms of providing, you know, working with practitioners inside of our organizations, building our bases with, using some measure of grief intervention as part of the way, look, you know, with the opioid crisis, which is another mass death event, you know, a condition of mass deaths. You know, the white right evangelical Christian, right; white nationalists, right, know perfectly well that you have to deal with people’s grief. They know it. That’s why they’re in the support groups. That’s why they are in 12-step programs. That’s why they’re everywhere where people are dealing with their grief, because they understand that grief is a vehicle for organizing.
The question is, when will the rest of us understand that? When will we get that? When will we get clear on that? We lost some relationship at the church. We lost some relationship to all of the various faith-based institutions that used to be a vehicle for organizing. Where are, how are we going to engage alongside people’s vastly painful and traumatic experiences of loss to transform those experiences into protagonism, into agency, into activity? This is the question for us. I don’t think I have all the answers, but I certainly know that that is the question.
[ soft music ]
JUSTICE: Crisis frequently create cover for increase surveillance and invasions of privacy. And these acts are commonly framed as necessary safety measures. Even as they repeatedly fail to make multi-marginalized folks feel more secure. So, how do we, as People of Color with disabilities keep each other safe while monitoring and mitigating future risk factors?
MALKIA: Well, you know, we saw with COVID the apps that folks were trying to use to, that the state was trying to use, rather, to identify points of infection and how those apps were then used to surveil communities and to offer or deny services.
You know, we’ve seen anytime there’s a disaster, we’ve seen it in Puerto Rico, we’ve seen it in Haiti, we’ve seen it all over the, we’ve seen it in New Orleans, you know, anytime there’s a disaster, it is an opportunity for the state to come in and to increase the level of authoritarianism, you know, both in terms of physical, you know, like adding license plate readers, adding cameras, adding, you know what I mean, like all kinds of physical surveillance equipment. But also, in terms of the structure of government, right, eliminating certain levels of oversight. Eliminating certain points of engage, community engagement.
So, first, just acknowledging that anytime there’s chaos, there’s an opportunity for the authoritarians to come in and take power. That said, it is also an opportunity for communities to come in and take power. So, chaos works both ways, you know. It’s a reorganization. It’s a moment when things aren’t as they have been. And there’s an opportunity for folks to come in and make a difference. And guess who knows that? The militia know that, when there are disasters, there’s a reason why it is often white men in trucks driving around giving out water and gasoline. What if it wasn’t? What if it was Black people? What if it was Black people, Black people, from various parts, what if it was Black trans people? What if it was Black disabled people? What if, what if someone else had access to the water and the gasoline and the guns, you know?
I just offer that as, as one point to think about, you know, that in the midst of chaos, who steps forward with necessary resources is often who will lead the day. So, as we think about our networks of care, and how they move in disasters, sometimes we think very small, you know. We think to ourselves, you know, we think we should take care of the seven people that we know, you know what I mean?
Or we think like, we not thinking about a whole neighborhood, for example. We’re not thinking about a whole city. We’re not thinking about, like all the natural — even in the pandemic, right, where we created these, these like networks of care, these mutual aid networks, which was actually amazing, right, it was an amazing feat, and amazing to watch so many people come together to care for each other. That said, they were relatively small. And that’s okay, right, small is good.
The question is, how do those small networks of care get linked up to each other, you know what I mean? How do they actually become not just places where you have to ask for help, which is what a lot of them did, you had to fill out a little form. Say what you needed and then they would respond to you. What would be different if we went even bolder?
[ soft music ]
JUSTICE: The phrase proximity to power often seems to signal that those of us who have been pushed to the margins, would fare better if we just got closer to those in power. But Malkia urges us to reorient a bit and consider the power that already exists amongst the people closest to us in proximity.
[ soft music ]
MALKIA: As an organizer, you know, I spent most of my life knocking on doors, you know. These days, it’s hard to get people to knock on somebody’s door; they’re scared, for good reason. People get shot through the door. People getting sick from somebody breathing on them. People are scared. They’re terrified. I get it. And yet, and yet, the only way forward is to knock on somebody’s door. You understand what I mean? Is to talk to them. Is to have face-to-face conversations. We do a lot online, we do a lot online, but our neighbors, our neighborhood, the people who are right there with us, are often the people we will be trapped with, right? What food do they have? What’s in their garden, you know? What do we even know about them?
And so, being able to, one, deal with proximity is very important. Dealing with who is in your geographic area is very important. Understanding the escape routes, understanding, you know, who got, who, you know, we talk about preppers, they fringe, we don’t, they’re wild, we don’t understand them. But at the same time, you know, who else is a prepper, my sister. [ Laughter ] As a matter of fact, my sister is right now in Mississippi running a camp called Camp KUZEEKO ( phonetic ) working with Black children. She just dropped them off not 20 minutes ago to their survival hut. Because she understands, and these are many different types. There’s trans children. There’s disabled children. There’s all of these children, Black children who are at this camp who are learning how to survive, because that’s what we need. So that’s the other piece. How are we teaching our children some of these skills in real ways, you know.
So, number one, get to know your people around you. Number two, think bold. Think bigger. Let’s take it beyond the internet. Let’s go face to face. Number three, let’s teach the children. You know, number four, let’s get hold of some of these resources, water, oil, weapons, and I say that to, I’m not saying that to be funny. And I’m not saying that to be extreme. I’m saying that because there are militias. There are militias. There are people out here in rural parts of Washington and rural parts of California and rural parts of New York, all throughout, and not just the rural parts, right, collecting amassing weapons. We know this. We know this. People who study right wing networks know this to be true.
So, the question for me is, for those, for the rest of us, what, what is the quality of our network? What is the strength of our ties? And I think when we can answer that, and when we can answer that fully and with deep love and profound intelligence, thoughtfulness, detail, we will find ourselves able to survive in a new way.
[ soft music ]
JUSTICE: Disaster justice requires media justice. Malkia tells us why and also, how we can help to address issues at this critical intersection.
MALKIA: Well, I think a few things: Number one, you know, as you are asked about safety and surveillance before, I was thinking also that one of the truths is that, we tend to wait till the crisis to make the intervention, but the intervention is most effective prior to the crisis.
And so, that’s something that I think is important to think about the narratives that lead outside of the crisis will also lead in the crisis. And so, if we are, if we are saturated in dominant narratives about the undeserving, you know, if we’re saturated in dominant narratives about Black people who don’t know how to manage resources. If we’re saturated in narratives about the unworthy, you know, this whole narrative that we heard repeatedly emerging through the pandemic, some people should just die, you know. That their lives were just simply unworthy. We’ve learned that. We’ve learned that narrative throughout the many wars, right?
We’ve been in the state of perpetual war for almost 50 years. Can you imagine what that kind of, what that dynamic has done to us as people, you know. What that dynamic has done to us, you know, from moving from that war on poverty to that war on drugs, to that war on crime, to that war on terror. And to just be in a perpetual state of othering, a perpetual state of deciding that some lives are simply not worth living.
As we move into this emergent fascism, that sentiment is, it’s not new. It’s not a new, this sentiment of expulsion and extermination is built on something. You know, it’s built on this, this, this 50 years, the hundred years, the 500 years, you know what I’m saying. So, so narrative, narrative strategies, cultural strategies, the ones that are less formal, the ones that actually shape the pictures, images and ideas in our heads create the mental maps that guide how we, what values we have. That guide what policies we approve, what politicians we elect. What, the ways that we decide life should be, you know, that, that, that what we decide is acceptable and unacceptable.
This is the kind of narrative strategy that is needed before, before a disaster hits. A narrative strategy that moves both formal and informal. That deals with both the, I mean when you think about disasters, right, in a disaster, just like in a war, when you lose the power of communication, you lose everything. You lose everything, right, you lose the ability to coordinate. You lose the ability to defend yourself. You have no idea what’s happening anywhere else. And those in power or those who want power know that. They know that very well. They know that very well.
And so, our ability to control our communication system is, is inherent to our survival. You know, it is essential to our survival, our ability to shape and control narratives, our ability to shape and control the infrastructure of communication, in the content of and beyond disasters our ability, like the decimation of local journalism is a threat to our survival. It isn’t simply like some esoteric distant problem, it is a, it is a visceral threat to our ability to survive a disaster. When these fires have, you know, when these fires are raging and we woke up, you know, that day in 2019, and there was just red or maybe it was 2020, and the sky was just red in California, you know. As they woke up just recently in New York and the sky was just red and orange in New York. And we suffer when local journalist do not have the ability to report on that. They are slow.
They don’t have the resources. And, you know, they use Twitter, right, to put out local, to put out alerts. That’s where people go for real-time updates. And we all know that Twitter is accessible and it has become a fashion of right wing organizing. So, so what happens when we can’t control the means of, when we have no control over the means of communication. You know, they say who controls the media controls the mind. Well also, controls the politics, controls the resources. Media and internet being able to, for example, shutdown the internet as the US is able to do. These are, these are threats to our survival. And they’re treated like neoliberal distant neoliberal problems, but they’re not, they’re not. They are very much, they are very visceral. Very central. And if we don’t resolve them, they will come to haunt us as like one of the means that our opponents, our enemies, those in power will use to not only take our lives, but to reduce the quality of whatever life we have. So, that’s kind of how I see, what I see as the relationship between the media infrastructure, the media strategies, the digital strategies and disaster.
I’ll say one last thing, which is that, you know, there are government programs that are slated to be defunded next year. Programs that give poor people access to broadband. There are all kinds of life line programs that give folks access to cell phones that under threat of defunding. There are all kinds of access issues that are on the table here and these access issues, when it comes to broadband, you know, obviously, disproportionately impact our communities, Black communities, brown communities, poor communities. And just like the media system, the internet has become essential to life. It’s not just an information system, it’s also the way we organize. It’s the way we connect. It’s the way we develop mutual aid networks. And so what happens when you don’t have access to it?
What happens when you only have access to a small part of it like Facebook, but you can’t access the rest, where will you get your news from? How will you know what’s happening? So, I just encourage anyone who cares about surviving to take a stand, protect local journalism, protect broadband access, deal with broadband costs, deal with all the things that get in the way of our ability to stay connected to one another.
[ soft music ]
JUSTICE: Now, we started this conversation off with reflections on loss. Here Malkia reminds us that loss and love are inextricably linked.
MALKIA: We are all going to lose what we love, every single one of us will go through either our private disasters or we will go through a public disaster, an individual disaster or collective disaster. In any case, anything you love will be lost, that’s the nature of life.
And yet, there’s no life without that love. And so, I think the message of love that I would offer is, we can prepare, as best as we can, to meet the world. To understand the conditions that we’re facing. To make accurate assessments. To study and learn. But at the end of the day, life is unpredictable. At the end of the day, we have no control. All of the control that we think we have is very much an illusion.
And the more we can understand that, the more that we can let go to and face into what is happening right now. Be as present as possible. I think that, in that, even inside of loss, tremendous, tremendous loss, when you lose multiple people in a few years, as I did, when you lose the person or people you love the most in the entire world, as I have, and still find that the sun rises and still find that the wind feels beautiful on your face and still find that there are babies who need your support, you know, there’s, there’s life inside of life.
There’s life inside of death. And I think that perhaps in the context of loss is when we discover our most tender selves. Maybe it’s in the context of loss that we discover our greatest bravery. Maybe it’s in the context of loss and in the context of vulnerability, in the context of recognizing that we need help, you know, that we actually discover our strength, our greatest strength. Courage from a feminist perspective is the ability to ask for and provide help.
It is the ability to have and receive empathy. This is, this is what courage is, you know. And I think what happens when we are tenderized by loss, is that we become feminists. I think that we become, we can become, we can become something greater than all the losses. And so, that’s my message of loss, which is to allow, which is to allow loss, loss of land, loss of language, loss of liberty, loss of body parts, loss of everything, anything, life, health, let it make you more of who you are.
[ soft music ]
JUSTICE: Anything you love will be lost, that’s the nature of life, and yet there is no life without love. These words shook me to my core and have radically refocused my attention on leaning into everything and every person I love. These words also fill me with the courage to embrace grief. A feeling I pray stays with me always.
I hope this entire interview served you in whatever ways you needed it to. Thank you so much for listening. Follow Malkia on Instagram @radicalloss. For more information and to access other audio companions or the whole written Disaster Justice Guidebook, go to JusticeShorter.com or AdultAdvocacyCenters.org.
[ soft music ]
Transcribed by Michelle Houston